Guest Opinion: Working Together to Make Every Day Earth Day

By Jeff McMahon

Since Earth Day was established some 40 years ago, it has evolved into a global movement celebrated by more than a billion people in 180 nations. By and large, this annual milestone has succeeded in raising widespread awareness about the impact of our lifestyle and consumption habits on the planet. We’ve come a long way locally and as a nation, but we still face a big challenge ahead. We need to stay focused on continuing to protect the planet and preserve its resources.   

At Waste Management, this is the heart of our business. Locally, we’re working to reduce overall impact on the environment by extracting more value from the thousands of tons of waste generated in in our community each day. We know, however, that we can only achieve a more sustainable world in partnership with our customers.

There are dozens of ways we can make the environment a priority—for example:

• Composting our yard waste and food scraps
• Recycling paper, packaging and e-waste
• Printing double-sided
• Reusing before tossing

These small commitments will have a long-term impact and help secure a prosperous and thriving future.

Our goal is to encourage, empower and enable our community to make environmental responsibility a part of everyday life. This means striving to make recycling convenient and more efficient, by placing solar compacting recycling kiosks in public spaces and college campuses and fully leveraging single-stream recycling so customers can place a variety of items from glass to paper into one bin. It also involves investing in technologies that turn hard to recycle materials into valuable resources.

This Earth Day, let us all take the opportunity to assess our daily habits and think about ways we can all continue to reduce our environmental footprint.

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Patch welcomes letters to the editor on any topics of interest to the Kirkland community. To submit a letter, email the editor at Greg.Johnston@Patch.com.